Tube bundles are found in industrial use in diverse applications, such as heat exchangers, condensers, air coolers, and so on. Depending on the heat transfer agent, one cannot avoid the tubes of the bundle becoming clogged or encrusted with dirt and grime over a lengthy period of use, which may even result in the total failure of individual tubes. It is therefore necessary from time to time to clean the inside of the tubes of such bundles and if need be the surface of the tube bundle.
At present, this is usually done by opening and manually approaching the tube bundle and pushing a high-pressure hose provided at its front end with a spray nozzle through the individual tubes, so that water or the like spraying from the spray nozzle, which may have a pressure of 25 to 3000 bar in the high-pressure hose, removes the deposits on the inner walls of the tubes. In this process, the operator is subjected to various dangers, depending on the setting in which the tube bundle is located and the nature and quality of the dirt in the tubes. Furthermore, with a manual cleaning by an operator it cannot be reliably prevented that individual tubes might be inadvertently left out from the cleaning and not get cleaned.
A method for the cleaning of tube bundles according to the preamble of patent claim 1 and a device for the cleaning of tube bundles according to the preamble of patent claim 16 is already known from DE 34 18 835 C2. This known device is used in particular to clean radioactively contaminated tube bundles in simple fashion and substantially with no manual working in their immediate proximity. For this, a video camera and lamps are arranged on a cleaning cart in the known device and a remotely disposed control device is provided with hand levers and with a monitor for the video camera, which controls the movements of the cleaning cart and the high-pressure hose.
But this semiautomatic solution (as it were) still requires operating personnel who control the remote control device with hand levers and track the activity through the images of the video camera. Thus, operating errors are still not precluded, i.e., it cannot be assured that all tubes of the particular bundle are being cleaned.